Worcester teachers train to help English learners

WORCESTER — Allison B. Audet was used to seeing students in her history classes whose first language wasn't English.

Some were from Latin America, some from Africa, some from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. And though she had taught on and off for eight years, she wished she could serve those students better.

"There's a lot of abstract ideas," Mrs. Audet said. "Especially with American history, there's a lot of background knowledge that English language learners may not have."

Now she believes she can help them more. Mrs. Audet, a teacher at Worcester Technical High School, is one of 21 people who graduated Wednesday from the Worcester English Language Learner Teacher Residency Program, a new program that gives existing teachers and instructional assistants the chance to earn a master's of education degree and their license to teach English as a second language. The program is a collaboration between Cambridge College, the Worcester public schools and the Boston-based Center for Collaborative Education.

The program cost participants $5,000. While the partner institutions contributed some money, the bulk was covered by a $500,000 federal Race to the Top grant, which is also paying for a second cohort of teachers and instructional assistants who will graduate in the summer.

The need to serve English language learners well is especially acute in Worcester, where 34 percent of students are learning the language, the highest percentage of any traditional school district in the state. (Four charter schools — one in Boston, two in Lawrence and one in Lowell — have higher levels.)

"Pretty much every teacher in the Worcester public schools, for the most part, is going to be in contact with an English language learner, whether they're teaching a specialized program or not," said Sarah Ottow, program director of the Worcester ELL Teacher Residency program.

The four-semester program, which includes in-person and online courses from Cambridge College, mentoring from Worcester public school staff, and visits to classrooms, came at a time when the state has been under pressure to better prepare teachers for English language learners. In 2011, the federal Department of Justice told the state it needed to train teachers in sheltered English immersion techniques, which prompted the state to require many teachers to undergo RETELL (Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners) training. Worcester teachers were among the first to undergo training, but those enrolled in the master's program were exempt.

For Mrs. Audet, the program has led her to make sure every lesson includes opportunities for students to demonstrate they can read, write, speak and listen. She also tries to make abstract ideas as concrete as possible. She has students vote to replicate participatory democracy, and a unit on manifest destiny will include a political cartoon, video clips and some music from that era to help students analyze the topic in context. For world history classes, she can also use some of the students' knowledge from their home country.

Other participants in the master's program included Martha Vazquez, an English as a second language tutor at Belmont Street Community School; and Debra L. Larkin, a learning disabilities teacher who works at Burncoat High School and Forest Grove Middle School. This was Miss Vazquez's first master's degree, and she said she has used everything from the program in her job. While she was used to working with small groups of students, the program gave her more confidence in her ability to work with larger groups in separate classrooms. "I don't think I would have been able to do this" without the program, she said.

Ms. Larkin said she has had more English language learners recently, and some of them had not been assessed properly because of the difficulty in distinguishing between weaknesses resulting from a lack of English and weaknesses caused by a disability.

"Sometimes there wasn't enough information gathered," she said. "Like a student might never have attended school before, so you can't expect them to be proficient if they're not literate."

Now, Ms. Larkin said, "I make sure I find out every bit of information possible so that I'm doing the right thing." She also feels more comfortable giving teachers suggestions about both disability and English language learner strategies.